Free Republic

Food insecurity is rising globally because of the war in Ukraine, according to experts, with Africa expected to be hit the hardest. The world’s superpowers, China and the U.S., say they are trying to mitigate the fallout but at the same time are accusing each other of exacerbating the crisis. A state newspaper, The China Daily, placed blame for the situation partially on Washington, saying: “Food prices have reached an all-time high, as Russian and Ukrainian grain exports are hindered by port disruptions and Western sanctions.” The U.S., for its part, has accused China of hoarding, after President Xi Jinping...

MADISON, Wis. — Over the last 50 years, the average temperature on St. Patrick’s Day in Madison has increased by more than 3 degrees. Madison isn’t alone; close to 97% of weather stations in the United States have seen an increase in average spring temperatures since 1970 (data collected from the Applied Climate Information System). Climate change may have a big impact on the unofficial drink of St. Patrick’s Day: beer. Three of the key ingredients are quite fragile when it comes to rising temperatures and prolonged drought. Large qualities of water are required to brew beer; water makes up...

Several thousand years ago, an Iron Age salt miner took a dump in what is now the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut area of Austria. In all likelihood, the pooper never gave their little deposit a second thought, and would be rather surprised to learn that it has now become a scientific artifact, enabling researchers to discover that Europeans ate blue cheese and drank beer 2,700 years ago. Reporting the ancient excrement in the journal Current Biology, the study authors reveal that the paleofeces has remained preserved in the region’s prehistoric salt mines over the past few millennia. Using a range of analytical techniques,...

The first fermented beverages most likely emerged alongside the development of cereal agriculture some 12,000 years ago. ========================================================================= If you’re searching for an original brewmaster to toast the next time you knock back a cold one, you might be out of luck. It’s difficult to attribute the invention of beer to a particular culture or time period, but the world’s first fermented beverages most likely emerged alongside the development of cereal agriculture some 12,000 years ago. As hunter-gatherer tribes settled into agrarian civilizations based around staple crops like wheat, rice, barley and maize, they may have also stumbled upon the...

Microscopic signatures of malting could help reveal which prehistoric people had a taste for beer. Ancient beer is difficult to trace, because many of beer’s chemical ingredients, like alcohol, don’t preserve well (SN: 9/28/04). But a new analysis of modern and ancient malted grain indicates that malting’s effects on grain cell structure can last millennia. This microscopic evidence could help fill in the archaeological record of beer consumption, providing insight into the social, ritual and dietary roles this drink played in prehistoric cultures, researchers report online May 7 in PLOS ONE. Malting, the first step in brewing beer, erodes cell...

China slapped an import ban on four Australian abattoirs Tuesday in an escalation of Beijing’s warning of a consumer boycott in retaliation for Canberra’s push for an independent coronavirus probe. The beef ban comes just days after China flagged plans to slap an 80 percent tariff on Australian barley, bringing the trade to its knees. Analysts said the move raised concerns of a possible standoff between Australia and its most important trading partner that could spill over into other crucial sectors as the world struggles to navigate the disease-induced economic crisis. The Financial Times reports China is Australia’s largest trade...

In a land flowing with milk and honey, what kinds of food made up the ancient Jewish diet? What did people eat and drink in Roman Palestine? Susan Weingarten guides readers through a menu of the first millennium C.E. in her article "Biblical Archaeology 101: The Ancient Diet of Roman Palestine," published in the March/April 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. Although it is difficult to reconstruct the diet of the average person in Palestine during the Roman and Late Antique periods, Weingarten, as both a food historian and an archaeologist, is well equipped for the task. Using archaeological remains...

The age of the grains was ascertained using radiocarbon dating. Based on the results, the grains originated in the period of the Pitted Ware culture, thus being approximately 4,300-5,300 years old. In addition to the cereal grains, the plant remnants found in the sites included hazelnut shells, apple seeds, tuberous roots of lesser celandine and rose hips. The study suggests that small-scale farming was adopted by the Pitted Ware Culture by learning the trade from farmers of the Funnel Beaker Culture, the latter having expanded from continental Europe to Scandinavia. Other archaeological artefacts are also evidence of close contact between...

The University of Copenhagen in Denmark is home to a unique collection of Ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts. A large part of the collection has not yet been translated, leaving researchers in the dark about what they might contain. "A large part of the texts are still unpublished. Texts about medicine, botany, astronomy, astrology, and other sciences practiced in Ancient Egypt," says Egyptologist Kim Ryholt, Head of the Carlsberg Papyrus Collection at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark... "It's totally unique for me to be able to work with unpublished material. It doesn't happen in many places around the world," says PhD...

The people who built the ancient structure, members of what's called the Natufian culture, struggled in a "hostile environment to gain more energy from their food," said Ehud Weiss, an archaeobotanist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who was not involved with the study. Archaeologists found the bread remains in sediment samples at a site named Shubayqa 1 in Jordan. The structure was oval with a fireplace in the center, and its builders carefully laid stones into the ground. Arranz Otaegui said she did not know whether the building was a dwelling or had other, perhaps ceremonial, purposes. Sifting through the...

Germany is the latest country to demand answers from Facebook after it emerged data from 50 million users was used to inform targeted election campaigns. German Justice Minister Katharina Barley on Thursday called such methods “a danger to democracy.” “The European Facebook management [team] must submit a comprehensive position on the scandal to the German government,” Barley told the Funke MedienGruppe on Thursday, demanding Facebook representatives visit her ministry in Berlin. […] Barley’s comments came as pressure grew on Facebook from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of a scandal involving British analysis firm Cambridge Analytica,...

When I was young and single, I rented part of an older lady’s house for many years. She had children who had become vegetarians, and was always hunting for something meatless but special to make for holidays. One Christmas she made this Dilled Vegetable-Barley Soup, from Molly Katzen’s ‘Enchanted Broccoli Forest’; it became one of my favorite recipes, and Katzen’s book one of my all-time favorite cookbooks. If you aren’t averse to the wine, add it, as it really brightens the soup; but the recipe is still very good without it. I’ve never used the fennel in this recipe, but...

More than 4,000 years ago builders carved out the entire surface of a naturally pyramid-shaped promontory on the Greek island of Keros. They shaped it into terraces covered with 1,000 tonnes of specially imported gleaming white stone to give it the appearance of a giant stepped pyramid rising from the Aegean: the most imposing manmade structure in all the Cyclades archipelago... Archaeologists from three different countries involved in an ongoing excavation have found evidence of a complex of drainage tunnels -- constructed 1,000 years before the famous indoor plumbing of the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete -- and traces...

Benjamin Franklin famously said, "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Science has proved him correct … still. A team of German scientists examined more than 13,000 molecular food compounds, looking for substances that may activate dopamine receptors in the same way that actual dopamine does. In other words, food that makes you happy. They found one in beer, a drink so noble that it is thought that beer was the nectar of the gods sipped by the Greek god Zeus from his goblet. "Drink. Be merry," commanded Zeus, or at least that's what...

First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research... "Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.," Liu said. "While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route...

Liu, together with doctoral candidate Jiajing Wang and a group of other experts, discovered the 5,000-year-old beer recipe by studying the residue on the inner walls of pottery vessels found in an excavated site in northeast China. The research, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provided the earliest evidence of beer production in China so far. The ancient Chinese made beer mainly with cereal grains, including millet and barley, as well as with Job's tears, a type of grass in Asia, according to the research. Traces of yam and lily root parts also appeared in...

ANCIENT BEVERAGE BREWED IN MILWAUKEE MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN — NPR reports that archaeologist Bettina Arnold of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her research team worked with Lakefront Brewery to try to re-create an alcoholic beverage that had been placed in a bronze cauldron and buried in a grave sometime between 400 and 450 B.C. in what is now Germany. The recipe was based upon the research of paleobotanist Manfred Rösch, who analyzed the residues in the Iron Age cauldron. He found evidence of honey, meadowsweet, barley, and mint—ingredients in a type of beverage known as a braggot.

Researchers from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution have discovered evidence to debunk the theory that Neandertals' disappearance was caused in part by a deficient diet -- one that lacked variety and was overly reliant on meat. After discovering starch granules from plant food trapped in the dental calculus on 40-thousand-year-old Neandertal teeth, the scientists believe that Neandertals ate a wide variety of plants and included cooked grains as part of a more sophisticated, diverse diet similar to early modern humans... The discovery of starch granules in the calculus on Neandertal teeth provides direct evidence that they made sophisticated,...

Scientists conducted tests on ancient pottery jars and funnels found at the Mijiaya archaeological site in China’s Shaanxi province. The analyses revealed traces of oxalate — a beer-making byproduct that forms a scale called “beerstone” in brewing equipment — as well as residues from a variety of ancient grains and plants. These grains included broomcorn millets, an Asian wild grain known as “Job’s tears,” tubers from plant roots, and barley. Barley is used to make beer because it has high levels of amylase enzymes that promote the conversion of starches into sugars during the fermenting process. It was first cultivated...

Jun. 18, 2006 0:24 | Updated Jun. 18, 2006 10:4511,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period. The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science. It is the...